I know what you mean but how do you want to sort it?
I mean, if it is a compilation, using the ARTIST as the defining starting point is sort of a bit counter intuitive, won't you agree?
What I would rather see is the ability to have an option not to display artists that are only part of a compilation, that would make way more sense to me.
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK I have the distinct impression that a top lawyer will be earning more than a top engineer could ever hope to. For example, I've never heard of a programmer charging more than about £1000/day, while I have heard of lawyers charging £1750/hour. (Of course they won't be pulling that in 8 hours/day, but even 1 hour/day gives them 75% more than the programmer, plus potentially a boat-load of free time)
I am sure there is the random engineer that climbs the corporate latter to the same level.
Sure, there are lawyers out there who charge that much, but I also know lawyers who are not better, if not worse, off than I am.
And that is the reality as well.
Sure, you can look at the top 1% of earners and say: "Hey, your top 1% makes more than my top 1%, but really, you're forgetting the other 99% who are making a lot less.
I had contacts in the past where I was paid $150/hour, and I did had 10 hour days, so in the end I would have ended up with $1500/day as well.
But the real question is (and I think that was answered further up): Why do people chose a profession? And the reality is quite true and simple that most kids chose it because they want to make a big buck. You've seen this during the dot.bomb years when suddenly everybody rushed in trying to make millions.
I would wager the guess that the average engineer is no better or worse off than the average lawyer.
Yes, the original idea was that, but when it became commerical the "nuclear strike" option wasn't really high on their thread assessment list.
IP does allow you to route around damaged areas still, but if the "Gateways" of one ISP all go down at the same time, their network IS down and there really is nothing you can do.
I have to wonder though what really went wrong there, did someone force an update of all the routing tables of all their core routers at the same time? Update the software on all the systems at the same time?
Seems a bit odd to me, I would have thought that they do a staged roll out of any of those changes, but apparantly that wasn't done.
General information about the BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons)
We are an official administrative authority of the German government called "Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien" (BPjM) ("Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons"). Our task is to protect children and adolescents in Germany from any media which might contain harmful or dangerous contents. This work is authorized by the "Youth Protection Law" (Jugendschutzgesetz - JuSchG).
Media monitored by us are, among others: videos, DVDs, computer games, audio records and CDs, print media and internet sites.
Objects are considered harmful or dangerous to minors if they tend to endanger their process of developing a socially responsible and self-reliant personality. In general, this applies to objects that contain indecent, extremely violent, crime-inducing, anti-Semitic or otherwise racist material.
The BPjM can only act on the request of other administrative institutions, not by itself. The German Youth Welfare Departments, among others, can file a complaint against an object. Once an official request has been filed, the BPjM is obliged to act.
A board of 12 representatives consisting of 8 different social organisations (e.g. artistic and literary community, entertainment industry, youth welfare, teachers, religious groups), 3 representatives of the federal states as well as the chairwoman of the BPjM, examines the respective object. If the board, with a majority of 2/3 of the members, decides that the object has a content dangerous for young people ("jugendgefährdend"), it enters its name into the "list of youth-endangering media" ("Liste jugendgefährdender Medien"), generally referred to as the "index". Distributors of that medium are then no longer permitted to sell, rent out or even present this object in public or to broadcast it. The same goes for advertising for this object. Violations of these restrictions will be punished under German jurisdiction.
If an object is obviously harmful to minors, it will be put on the index in a simplified act, requiring a unanimous vote, executed by a board of 3 representatives of the groups mentioned above ( 23 I JuSchG).
In case of a severe danger to minors, the object does not need to be put on the "index"; the distribution restrictions will be effective regardless ( 15 II JuSchG).
Media with pornographic content are regularly considered to be obviously and severely harmful to minors. Pornography itself is defined by the German High Court as a presentation of sexuality that is not connected to any kind of psychologically motivated human relationship and which glorifies sexual satisfaction as the only reason for human existence, often accompanied by grossly depicted genitals.
Distributing those objects to minors is illegal ( 15 I and III-VI JuSchG) and will be punished by law ( 27 JuSchG). In addition, the German penal code (Strafgesetzbuch - StGB) penalizes the dissemination of pornographic content ( 184 StGB).
Completely prohibited - even among people of legal age - are the depictions of sexual acts involving children, animals or violence. Similar regulations prohibit media with explicitly violent content.
The spreading of pornographic content and other harmful media via the internet is a criminal offence under German jurisdiction. A pornographic content on the internet is legal only if technical measures prohibit minors from getting access to the object (AVS = Age Verification System or Adult-Check-System).
The owner/distributor has the right to defend his/her film/music/game/book/site against the charges of youth-endangering content.
If the board decides to enter a product into the "index", the verdict will be announced in the official government information paper ("Bundesanzeiger") as well as in the BPjM-publication "BPjM-Aktuell". The author/distributor will receive
Those games aren't banned. What happens is they are restricted to people of ages 18 and over.
They are also not allowed to be displayed in places where kids could see them, they can only be sold to adults, this also eliminates any mail order.
That is not censorship. Censorship would remove those games from the market entirely. This just restricts access to minors, similar to your AO rating.
Besides, do you have any idea how LONG it takes for this "censorship" to kick in? It can be months, because they only look at these things once someone complains to them, then they have to look at it. They don't just go out on their own to find and get rid of those games.
Consider next that Germany outlawed Wolfenstein 3D because it contained various symbols of the WWII Nazi regime, despite the game hardly being sympathetic to the Nazis.
True, but those rules came from the US after the end of the war. And you cannot "pick and chose" when a sign is appropriate and when not.
It was decided (very long ago) that the swastika is NOT something that is allowed in Germany and that's it. They are just consequent in the way they go about it.
It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with censorship either. Change the symbol and the thing would have been fine (from that standpoint).
Besides, as someone else pointed out: America & Sex isn't working any better, now is it? I really don't understand the fuss about "Hot Coffee".
No, there will be a formular that calculates the resolution x time == damage.
So yes, 320x240 is worth $2 for 45 minutes, your HD rip that you get via Bittorrent though is worth more depending on resolution.
Interesting to note btw, I saw that beginning this season they start offering full fledged HD downloads with AC3 sound on the Torrent sites, with roughly 2x the file size than the "standard" torrents.
Which, IMHO, all goes towards supporting the argument that "gun problems" have nothing to do with guns, and everything to do with people.
Yes and no.
You can own a weapon, but most of those are hunting rifles, which tend to be rather cumbersome in "concealing", plus two shots and you have to reload, not very effective in either a drive-by or an assault.
Same goes for hand guns. Yes, you can shoot them at the range, but as I understand it you are not allowed to remove the guns from the premisses.
The difference? If a cop stops you he doesn't have to assume that you have a loaded gun nearby.
When I lived in Virginia for a while a collegue told me he had a gun in the glove compartment: Loaded and ready to go, although, as he admitted, he wasn't allowed to have it that way, in essence he could have the bullets in the trunk and the gun in the glove compartment, but not loaded and ready, unless he was at a shooting range or on private property.
I am sure he wasn't the only one who drove around with a gun like this, so no wonder cops are quite a bit more nervous.
There is btw, an interesting chapter on Gun control in "The Rebel Sell" which looks a bit closer at the "Myth" that gun control doesn't work (it is mainly in relation to a critic of "counter culture" and Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" and in essence arguing that he forgoes the obvious conclusion (Gun Control works) in order to further his own social agenda (it's the people stupid).
It doens't say anything about "downloading" but recording I am allowed to.
So: Instead of firing up my MythTV box (darn hdds) I pull it from somewhere else, does it make a difference for theM? I still would count this as "fair use" unless I am missing something obvious here (which is possible).
Then they're like "oh, yeah, Linux, right?".... and it's things like that that hold them back. Sure, it's not the only thing, but it's the picture as a whole that we draw about the user experience under Linux...
Honestly, I see your point to some degree, but why would Linux have to behave like windows just to make it easier for them to switch?
There even is a learning curve when you move from Windows to the Mac, and although Linux can use some more userfriendlyness (dependency hell for one) it doesn't have to be more like Windows.
If people are complaining about Linux being "different" and they have to learn things again than this is just a lame excuse to NOT switch.
Linux on the desktop for the average Jane or Joe is far from perfect, but it isn't all broken either.
Those who want can switch, I dropped Windows at home back in '99 in 2002 I switched to MacOS X (on the desktop, servers are still on Linux / BSD), now I only have to deal with it at work and I have gotten more used to OS X that I find it rather cumbersome to do some things in Windows.
I think this is similar to gun "control" laws- two of the places with the biggest restrictions on guns have the highest crime rates- California and Wash. D.C.
"Crime"? What kind of crime? Violent crime or pick pocketing?
If my chances are 10x higher that someone picks my pocket, but my chances of being shot to death is 2x lower I rather take the gun control law.
Besides, look at Canada, there IS a Gun control in effect and for some reason people aren't being "gunned down" or any more in danger than in the US (probably far less).
The problem of course is: What to do with all the guns that are already out there on the street?
I'm getting soooo sick of this sense of self-entitlement... "give me everything for free" attitude.
I pay for the Movienetwork here in Canada that shows Rome (think HBO Canadian Style) and i still download it because I don't have a VCR and I am hardly at home when it shows.
The UN is nothing but a soapbox for petty dictators and thugs.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
I do not want an organization whose general assembly is dominated by autocrats to be able to censor domains based on their concept of what is acceptable. Everything basically works fine with the US running it with very little actual central control.
MMmhh, you mean like the whole XXX domain idea?
But the more important point is this: what would happen if China or North Korea were able to remove all domain names referring to sites advocating freedom, or Iran were able to pull all porn domains, etc.? Every client would simply switch to a different set of root servers controlled in the same lasseiz-faire manner as the current roots, and in 5 years we'd be back in the same situation.
Right, because as you can see in the UN getting everybody to agree to enact things are such an easy (and fast) task.
An international body would most likely have less influence on the DNS System then when the Mothership (aka US) decides to forcea block / change.
I say we just send the UN some Dell brochures and tell them to set up their own damn servers if they want to control DNS so badly. Then we can laugh as they beg to get people in the free world to actually use them.
The problem isn't so much that copyright and patents are inheritly evil, it is just that over the last couple of decades corporations have started to (ab)use these laws and twist them for their own use.
That alone didn't really cause any problems either until maybe the last five years when suddenly EVERYBODY could literally become a law breaker because the technology was suddenly widely available.
I think everything has it's place, but it is also clear that especially big business has a problem with adapting to a very rapidly changing environment and tries whatever they can to hold onto what they already have.
The problem with many current business models is that they all assume that growth is indefinet and that is the biggest fallacy of all.
I think you'll see a market shrinkage, despite big business trying everything they can to force people to buy their products (and I say force here, because since when do you sue your customers???)
Oh I would love Bluetooth in the iPod, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
Main reason being that in North America Bluetooth is still a rarety. Here in Canada neither Telus nor Bell (to my knowledge) offer a phone that is bluetooth enabled. The ony ones who do are Rogers and Fido (well, all Rogers now) and they don't really push that either.
Same thing with PCs, yes all of the new Macs have more or less Bluetooth built in or at least have it available as an option, but on the PC sector it is still "cheap is beautiful".
Besides you still would need to charge your iPod somehow, unless they come up with a nifty induction charging bluetooth doesn't make a lot of sense.
Speaking of induction, it would be REALLY great, if you could just have a "plate" where at the end of the day when you come home you can drop in your cellphone, headset and iPod (and other gadgets) and they automatically charge and sync via Bluetooth or wireless, next morning you just pick it up and go out the door.
Err.. you mean if the RCMP are after you, you go slower? Where is the fun in a chase like that?:-)
The fact that my little shitty car couldn't outrun the cruiser;)
My fastest way back though was from Calgary --> Edmonton. Under two hours. It's nice if you have some Frat boys in front of you who drive a freaking hummer and kick everybody out of the way (plus the slip stream helps you save on gas);)
Personal record though must be three hours from Grande Cache to Edmonton:)
Shaw apparantly has rolled it out quite successfully (judging by some comments it seems almost TOO successful), so has Primus.
Rogers may be a while though, I worked there for a while and when I left (a year ago) it was still in the "internal testing" phase I think they called it.
Not too suruprising. Over the last ten years or so a lot of infrastructure was built.
Alberta for example is building the Supernet which is done by Bell, so they already run Fibre etc. in that province and it IS supposed to be Wireless, so they can probably build on top of that.
I'd be surprised if there aren't similar efforts being made in other areas.
Plus Roger's existing infrastructure is different enough that if the privitization were to happen, AND if a company were to consider a hostile buyout of the now privatized Sasktel - it'd be much more likely to be Bell - not Rogers. You buy what works with what you have, so CDMA for their existing GSM network is a square plug for a round hole.
If they would "sell off" Sasktel chances are good you'd see a bidding war between Telus and Bell. Bell wants West (Hence Bell West) and Telus wants to go east, and more importantly, keep Bell as far away as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I know what you mean but how do you want to sort it?
I mean, if it is a compilation, using the ARTIST as the defining starting point is sort of a bit counter intuitive, won't you agree?
What I would rather see is the ability to have an option not to display artists that are only part of a compilation, that would make way more sense to me.
I am sure there is the random engineer that climbs the corporate latter to the same level.
Sure, there are lawyers out there who charge that much, but I also know lawyers who are not better, if not worse, off than I am.
And that is the reality as well.
Sure, you can look at the top 1% of earners and say: "Hey, your top 1% makes more than my top 1%, but really, you're forgetting the other 99% who are making a lot less.
I had contacts in the past where I was paid $150/hour, and I did had 10 hour days, so in the end I would have ended up with $1500/day as well.
But the real question is (and I think that was answered further up): Why do people chose a profession? And the reality is quite true and simple that most kids chose it because they want to make a big buck. You've seen this during the dot.bomb years when suddenly everybody rushed in trying to make millions.
I would wager the guess that the average engineer is no better or worse off than the average lawyer.
That would be Milnet these days.
Yes, the original idea was that, but when it became commerical the "nuclear strike" option wasn't really high on their thread assessment list.
IP does allow you to route around damaged areas still, but if the "Gateways" of one ISP all go down at the same time, their network IS down and there really is nothing you can do.
I have to wonder though what really went wrong there, did someone force an update of all the routing tables of all their core routers at the same time? Update the software on all the systems at the same time?
Seems a bit odd to me, I would have thought that they do a staged roll out of any of those changes, but apparantly that wasn't done.
It's not new. It always was that way. You will also find CDs, Books, TV Shows and movies on that list.
It is pretty much like an AO or NC-17 rating in the US, the only difference is that there is a legal backing to it that prevents marketing etc.
http://www.bundespruefstelle.de/ is their official website, you may want to use the fish to understand better what they are supposed to be doing.
Those games aren't banned. What happens is they are restricted to people of ages 18 and over.
They are also not allowed to be displayed in places where kids could see them, they can only be sold to adults, this also eliminates any mail order.
That is not censorship. Censorship would remove those games from the market entirely. This just restricts access to minors, similar to your AO rating.
Besides, do you have any idea how LONG it takes for this "censorship" to kick in? It can be months, because they only look at these things once someone complains to them, then they have to look at it. They don't just go out on their own to find and get rid of those games.
True, but those rules came from the US after the end of the war. And you cannot "pick and chose" when a sign is appropriate and when not.
It was decided (very long ago) that the swastika is NOT something that is allowed in Germany and that's it. They are just consequent in the way they go about it.
It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with censorship either. Change the symbol and the thing would have been fine (from that standpoint).
Besides, as someone else pointed out: America & Sex isn't working any better, now is it? I really don't understand the fuss about "Hot Coffee".
No, there will be a formular that calculates the resolution x time == damage.
So yes, 320x240 is worth $2 for 45 minutes, your HD rip that you get via Bittorrent though is worth more depending on resolution.
Interesting to note btw, I saw that beginning this season they start offering full fledged HD downloads with AC3 sound on the Torrent sites, with roughly 2x the file size than the "standard" torrents.
Deaf People?
Yes and no.
You can own a weapon, but most of those are hunting rifles, which tend to be rather cumbersome in "concealing", plus two shots and you have to reload, not very effective in either a drive-by or an assault.
Same goes for hand guns. Yes, you can shoot them at the range, but as I understand it you are not allowed to remove the guns from the premisses.
The difference? If a cop stops you he doesn't have to assume that you have a loaded gun nearby.
When I lived in Virginia for a while a collegue told me he had a gun in the glove compartment: Loaded and ready to go, although, as he admitted, he wasn't allowed to have it that way, in essence he could have the bullets in the trunk and the gun in the glove compartment, but not loaded and ready, unless he was at a shooting range or on private property.
I am sure he wasn't the only one who drove around with a gun like this, so no wonder cops are quite a bit more nervous.
There is btw, an interesting chapter on Gun control in "The Rebel Sell" which looks a bit closer at the "Myth" that gun control doesn't work (it is mainly in relation to a critic of "counter culture" and Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" and in essence arguing that he forgoes the obvious conclusion (Gun Control works) in order to further his own social agenda (it's the people stupid).
It doens't say anything about "downloading" but recording I am allowed to.
So: Instead of firing up my MythTV box (darn hdds) I pull it from somewhere else, does it make a difference for theM? I still would count this as "fair use" unless I am missing something obvious here (which is possible).
Honestly, I see your point to some degree, but why would Linux have to behave like windows just to make it easier for them to switch?
There even is a learning curve when you move from Windows to the Mac, and although Linux can use some more userfriendlyness (dependency hell for one) it doesn't have to be more like Windows.
If people are complaining about Linux being "different" and they have to learn things again than this is just a lame excuse to NOT switch.
Linux on the desktop for the average Jane or Joe is far from perfect, but it isn't all broken either.
Those who want can switch, I dropped Windows at home back in '99 in 2002 I switched to MacOS X (on the desktop, servers are still on Linux / BSD), now I only have to deal with it at work and I have gotten more used to OS X that I find it rather cumbersome to do some things in Windows.
"Crime"? What kind of crime? Violent crime or pick pocketing?
If my chances are 10x higher that someone picks my pocket, but my chances of being shot to death is 2x lower I rather take the gun control law.
Besides, look at Canada, there IS a Gun control in effect and for some reason people aren't being "gunned down" or any more in danger than in the US (probably far less).
The problem of course is: What to do with all the guns that are already out there on the street?
I pay for the Movienetwork here in Canada that shows Rome (think HBO Canadian Style) and i still download it because I don't have a VCR and I am hardly at home when it shows.
So I am not really getting it for free, now am I?
Weapons of Mass Destruction
MMmhh, you mean like the whole XXX domain idea?
Right, because as you can see in the UN getting everybody to agree to enact things are such an easy (and fast) task.
An international body would most likely have less influence on the DNS System then when the Mothership (aka US) decides to forcea block / change.
I think you miss their point entirely.
M.
The problem isn't so much that copyright and patents are inheritly evil, it is just that over the last couple of decades corporations have started to (ab)use these laws and twist them for their own use.
That alone didn't really cause any problems either until maybe the last five years when suddenly EVERYBODY could literally become a law breaker because the technology was suddenly widely available.
I think everything has it's place, but it is also clear that especially big business has a problem with adapting to a very rapidly changing environment and tries whatever they can to hold onto what they already have.
The problem with many current business models is that they all assume that growth is indefinet and that is the biggest fallacy of all.
I think you'll see a market shrinkage, despite big business trying everything they can to force people to buy their products (and I say force here, because since when do you sue your customers???)
Oh I would love Bluetooth in the iPod, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
Main reason being that in North America Bluetooth is still a rarety. Here in Canada neither Telus nor Bell (to my knowledge) offer a phone that is bluetooth enabled. The ony ones who do are Rogers and Fido (well, all Rogers now) and they don't really push that either.
Same thing with PCs, yes all of the new Macs have more or less Bluetooth built in or at least have it available as an option, but on the PC sector it is still "cheap is beautiful".
Besides you still would need to charge your iPod somehow, unless they come up with a nifty induction charging bluetooth doesn't make a lot of sense.
Speaking of induction, it would be REALLY great, if you could just have a "plate" where at the end of the day when you come home you can drop in your cellphone, headset and iPod (and other gadgets) and they automatically charge and sync via Bluetooth or wireless, next morning you just pick it up and go out the door.
Yeah, I don't seem to be the only site that gets siphoned off though, there are a lot of other blogs harvested as well.
Maybe they are just trying to "test" their script(s)?
Seems s/he is doing it for other blogs as well, but here is one of the "track backs" I saw:
s tuff.html
http://triathalonbike.blogspot.com/2005/08/heavy-
Really, no idea why they are doing this.
What I find worse is that it seems someone is "hijacking" my blog by copying all of MY entries into his / her blog.
I have no idea WHY they are doing this (they are still linking back to me though).
The fact that my little shitty car couldn't outrun the cruiser
My fastest way back though was from Calgary --> Edmonton. Under two hours. It's nice if you have some Frat boys in front of you who drive a freaking hummer and kick everybody out of the way (plus the slip stream helps you save on gas)
Personal record though must be three hours from Grande Cache to Edmonton
Shaw apparantly has rolled it out quite successfully (judging by some comments it seems almost TOO successful), so has Primus.
Rogers may be a while though, I worked there for a while and when I left (a year ago) it was still in the "internal testing" phase I think they called it.
Not too suruprising. Over the last ten years or so a lot of infrastructure was built.
Alberta for example is building the Supernet which is done by Bell, so they already run Fibre etc. in that province and it IS supposed to be Wireless, so they can probably build on top of that.
I'd be surprised if there aren't similar efforts being made in other areas.
See, this is why the West feels so alianted (well Alberta anyways)
If they would "sell off" Sasktel chances are good you'd see a bidding war between Telus and Bell. Bell wants West (Hence Bell West) and Telus wants to go east, and more importantly, keep Bell as far away as possible.
They could make quite a profit there.